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The true picture of a site's position in SEs<< Performing Due Diligence on Sites Whether doing due diligence on a site before buying it (the real purpose of this section), or learning something about SEO to apply to your own site, please bear in mind that we are not SEOs and cannot help with individual SEO related questions. (Glossary of terms) This page: Analysing the site's SEO - too much spells disaster Did he over-egg the pudding? How do you recognise when a site you want to buy has crossed the line? We'll let you into a little secret. First, some background. Despite limited cooperation the Search Engines extend the SEO industry SEs see SEO as something that makes their jobs more difficult. Google pinned their flag on links; and soon sites were exchanging links purely to build their link pop and "manipulate" Google's results. At various times other search engines played with ranking based on on-site factors like meta tags, <h1> tags and keyword density - all easily manipulated. Basing results on off-site factors like anchor text soon had SEOs paying for links bearing their preferred anchor text. Combinations of on-site and off-site factors are open to the same abuses. So search engines are using whole new types of intelligent algorithms that can spot auto-generated pages, detect even complex reciprocal linking arrangements, recognise other "unnatural" activity - like a sudden rise in incoming links derived from paid advertising campaigns, find commonalities between your site and a banned site, and much more. And their programs are learning as they grow, detecting new spamming techniques, leveraging their vast data to discern patterns, incorporating information from other parts of the company - like toolbar info, tracking clicks in SERPS, Adsense data, and more, and even recording false positives for future improvements in the software. A site attempting to beat all of that is fighting a losing battle. Doing the detective work to uncover the on-site SEO work may take some time but can be accomplished (and there are good services like Aaron Wall's SEO Book). To run the checks on the off-site SEO work takes a lot of time and possibly some very sophisticated hardware and software. So, don't do it. Take the easy route. You'd be surprised how easily site sellers will talk up the SEO they've done on their site. They want to impress you with the large volumes of SE traffic you can expect to get so, if anything, they'll exaggerate the optimisation they've done. Here's the secret: Just ask them how optimised the site is for search engines! And sit back. This page: Analysing the site's SEO - too much spells disaster << Other Research You Can Do On Web Business
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